O'Connor, S Day just

this was broken?

offhand remark on campaign trail vs jimmy c prompted scotus woman promise?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan_Supreme_Court_candidates

bork etc

she and souter pals, both moved to center?

bak?

===

an 5 24

alternet-no lnx

The supreme scheme: How Alito and Thomas are fueling the ongoing Trump coup

Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sits with his wife and conservative activist Virginia Thomas while he waits to speak at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Thom Hartmann May 20, 2024

Senator Dick Durbin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, needs to act.

Supreme Court Associate Justice Sam Alito was just caught red-handed promoting Trump’s fascist “stop the steal” campaign to overthrow the 2020 election and end democracy in America by flying the upside-down flag at his home. He then went on Fox “News” and lied that it was his wife’s fault and that she did it because schoolchildren at a nearby bus stop saw a neighbor’s “F*ck Trump” yard sign.

In fact, as the Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt pointed out this past weekend:

“Mrs. Alito was so alarmed by the degradations and profane, yet protected speech that she went immediately home, and inverted the American flag signaling distress. Here’s the problem: there were no school buses and no school children on them in January 2021 in Alexandria, Virginia. Schools in the city were closed for a full year as a result of the pandemic and didn’t re-open until March 2021.”

READ: America in the final stage of a 40-year transition

But Alito’s fingers were apparently far deeper in the January 6th coup attempt than most Americans realize. Trump lawyer Sydney Powell pointed out on Stew Peters’ rightwing YouTube channel that she, Louie Gohmert, and Kari Lake (among others) had filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying the Electoral College vote on January 6th.

It was a legal attempt to try to do what Trump sent a mob to do when the legal strategy failed:

“We were filing a 12th Amendment constitutional challenge to the process that the Congress was about to use per the Electoral Act provisions that simply don’t jibe with the 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Justice Alito was our circuit court justice for that. Louie Gohmert was the plaintiff in our lawsuit and we were suing the Vice President to follow the 12th Amendment as opposed to the Electoral Count Act.” (emphasis mine)

The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, is the provision under which a contested election for president gets thrown to Congress, as happened in the 1876 election where Democrat Sam Tilden got more electoral and popular votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by the first count.

That election ended up thrown to the House because three states had submitted two sets of Electoral College votes (just like Trump’s are fake electors), so Congress cut a deal to end Reconstruction in exchange for making Hayes president, even though he arguably lost the election.

The lawsuit, filed by Gohmert, Kari Lake, and a handful of Republican operatives, demanded the delay so Republicans on the Supreme Court could decide who’d be president, just like they did in the 2000 election. It called for:

“[R]espondent Vice President of the United States to refrain from invoking the dispute-resolution provisions of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 … for the duration of this Court’s consideration of a timely filed petition for a writ of certiorari. As set forth in the argument below, the ECA violates the Electors’ Clause, the Twelfth Amendment, and the Constitution’s structural protections of liberty.”

If Alito would rule that Pence must defer to Congress per the 12th Amendment, the election of 2020 would be thrown to the House with each state having one vote. There, the presidency would have gone to Trump 27-23, because 27 states’ congressional delegations were then controlled by Republicans.

This was not a brand-new or hastily organized plan. I wrote on March 13, 2020 — eight months before the election — that Republicans I knew in Washington DC had informed me that the Trump folks were planning this exact strategy.

And, sure enough, here it was, with Sam Alito as the inside man.

The invasion of the House chamber by the “stop the steal” traitors was, by the theory of this plan, supposed to delay the counting of electoral college votes at least for a day, to give Alito time to act on the next day, January 7th. He and the courts would then rule that the 12th amendment took precedent to law made since then, Congress would declare Trump the winner, and that would be the end of the discussion.

But Nancy Pelosi got wind of the plot and blew it up by re-convening Congress at 8 pm to count the votes, just two hours after the last of the rioters had left the building and before Alito could rule. As Trump‘s senior attorney Powell told Peters:

“Nancy Pelosi had finagled to file an amicus brief in it — there had been inside goings on in Congress where I believe it was Steve Scalise and [Speaker Kevin] McCarthy [who] kept her from being an actual party; she wanted to work herself inside the case as a party but somehow that didn’t happen — so she got notice when we made our filing because she’d filed an amicus brief. And then everything broke loose and she really speeded up reconvening Congress to get the vote [count] going, or [Bill Barr’s] Justice [Department] might have issued an injunction to stop it all, which is what should have happened.”

In the end, Alito had to turn down the lawsuit on the morning of January 7th because Congress had already voted to certify the election for Biden.

As a result, we’ll never know how close we came to having a single corrupt Supreme Court justice overturn the election, but that flag flying outside his house gives us a pretty good clue as to what he may well have done the morning of January 7th had Pelosi not quickly acted the previous evening.

But Alito’s attempts to overturn our democracy weren’t limited to his support for Trump’s treasonous acts on January 6th. Were it not for Alito, Clarence Thomas, and at least two other Republicans on the Court, Donald Trump would by now have almost certainly been convicted in federal Judge Tanya Chutkan’s courtroom of seditiously trying to overthrow our government.

That federal criminal case was rapidly moving along when Trump’s lawyers made the absurd assertion that he was immune from prosecution for his attempted sedition because of a brand new, previously unheard of, and totally bizarre, made-up doctrine of presidential immunity. Even Richard Nixon didn’t have the cojones to try that one: he simply admitted his guilt and accepted a pardon to avoid going to prison.

It only takes four members of the Court to grant certiorari, allowing the Court to hear a case: four or more Republicans on the Court went out of their way to give Trump the delay he desperately needed. On February 28th, they granted cert and scheduled oral arguments for the very last day of their 2023-2024 session, the week of April 22nd.

To add insult to the injury to our republic, in oral arguments Alito dropped this little bomb on America, turning the case against Trump inside-out and claiming Trump should get a free pass to crime all he wanted:

“I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully, if that candidate is an incumbent?

“All right. Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?

“And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”

Thankfully, at least for the historical record, the Attorney representing Jack Smith’s Justice Department, Michael Dreeben, immediately replied:

“I think it’s exactly the opposite, Justice Alito.”

But Alito, not Dreeben, is on the Court and is the decision-maker. Alito thus gave — and continues to give — Trump a desperately needed further delay by slow-walking his own part of the Court’s decision in the Trump immunity case.

Even if they rule against Trump, which everybody assumed would happen before Alito dropped that rhetorical turd into the proceeding, by giving Donny the delay he wanted, the Republicans on the Court reduced the chance that Trump will ever be held to account for his crimes.

While the Court typically releases their decisions during the summer, they have the option of waiting as long as they want — even until well past the November election date. So, if Trump is elected, he can fire Jack Smith and end the prosecution himself.

And it’s not like Alito and Thomas don’t have a stake in this fight. If Biden is re-elected, by the 2028 election Alito will be 78 and Thomas 80. Insiders have speculated that both would like to retire soon and have their replacements appointed by a Republican president.

And it won’t be the first time a corrupt Republican on the Court threw an election just to insure that body remained in Republican hands. You’ll recall, in 2000 Sandra Day O’Connor’s husband told friends that the reason she voted to stop the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount and make George W. Bush president was simply because she didn’t want Al Gore to choose her replacement.

Arguably the most galling part of this entire pathetic drama is the response of Democrats with subpoena power in the US Senate. Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, for example, issued a miserably weak request for Alito to recuse himself from cases having to do with January 6th, rather than demand the man resign and calling a hearing to make it happen.

We all know what would have happened if the shoe was on the other foot.

A Republican-controlled Senate confronting a Democratic Supreme Court appointee accused of corruption would be holding nationally televised public hearings, dragging that justice and his family and intimates before Congress for a grilling, and demanding both prosecution and impeachment.

That’s exactly what happened in the spring of 1969, when Republicans on the Senate Judiciary committee — along with a coordinated effort by President Nixon and Republicans in the media — accused the most liberal member of the Court, Abe Fortas, of being corrupt.

This was Nixon’s chance to flip the balance of the Supreme Court, while conservatives across the nation were still angry about the Brown v Board decision.

Fortas had taken a $20,000 payment from a man he’d defended years earlier; the man hadn’t been able to pay at the time, and finally came up with the money a year or so after LBJ put Fortas on the Court. Not exactly a crime, by any measure.

Fortas was also paid a $15,000 advance for a book he wrote, and Republicans alleged his wife had evidence of tax evasion, although it later turned out that charge was entirely manufactured out of thin air. No crimes here, either.

Nonetheless, the complaints about “Supreme Court corruption” and accompanying threats and pressure from Congressional Republicans against Fortas and his wife — and the firestorm in the media stirred up by Republican commentators — was so intense that Fortas resigned on May 14, 1969 just to get the torture to stop.

Consider that when you think about Alito’s wife hanging the upside-down flag, or her close association with hard-core rightwing causes including her alleged involvement in “Operation Higher Court.” Or Ginni Thomas’ involvement with the January 6th coup attempt itself, texting Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:

“Watermarked ballots in over 12 states have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” and “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc.) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”

Keep in mind that in the 2016 election, the singular thing that caused millions of Republicans — who otherwise considered Trump a fraud, con man, and sexual pervert — to vote for him was that Mitch McConnell was holding Merrick Garland’s seat on the Supreme Court open.

As Vox reported:

“One in five [2016] voters told CNN in an exit poll that the Supreme Court was one reason they had cast a ballot. Of the voters who said it was the ‘most important factor’ in their decision, 56 percent voted for Trump. According to the Washington Post, 26 percent of all Trump voters polled said that the Supreme Court was the basis of their decision.”

This fall, the corruption of the Supreme Court by corporate, billionaire, and fossil fuel interests should be at the top of Biden’s re-election campaign: polls show a majority of Americans are horrified by it.

Both Thomas — whose bribe-taking in exchange for his votes on Citizens United and other cases is well documented — and his rightwing buddy Sam Alito must resign or face impeachment. If Republicans could pull it off against a totally innocent Abe Fortas back in the day, Democrats should be able to do it now against two guys whose corruption is obvious to everybody.

Democrats in Congress — particularly on the Senate Judiciary Committee — need to grow a damn spine and make it happen.

NOW READ: The Supreme Court's wealth-driven corruption crisis

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https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158887

Reagan is a revered figure in American life. Certainly, liberals are critical of his legacy on many counts. But Americans in general rank him as one of our greatest presidents, perhaps most of all because of his role in ending the Cold War.

Yet a specter hovers over Reagan’s reputation, one too little addressed by historians. This is his disturbing record on issues of race and civil rights.

There has been much fine history written in recent years about the white “backlash” against the progress of racial equality in American life, a backlash dating back to the 1940s. Yet, rather oddly, Reagan and Reaganism—the broader political tendency he represented, which generally favored limited government at home and military supremacy abroad—have not figured centrally in these counter-histories to the era of progressive strides toward freedom. Ronald Reagan was the most successful and effective white backlash politician in the post-Brown era, and the conservative appeal to white voters as white voters was a central component in the broader politics of Reaganism.

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After these historic measures were firmly in place, Reagan—perfectly representing broader tactical shifts within the conservative movement—pivoted to a new stance. Now he supported individualistic civil rights protections, but he framed the new danger on the race front as that of “quotas,” by which he meant affirmative action.

I know of no instance where Reagan explicitly acknowledged his change of position on civil rights, although perhaps such evidence exists somewhere. “Certainly no one of us would challenge government’s right and responsibility to eliminate discrimination in hiring and education,” he told one audience when he ran for president in 1976. Actually, Reagan had spent years “challenging” exactly this. Reagan went on to say, “If your ancestry is Czechoslovakian, Polish, Italian, or if you are of the Jewish faith, you may find yourself the victim of discrimination” in favor of presumably less deserving African Americans, because of affirmative action policies.

Reagan’s exploitation of racial tension proved more a political tool for gaining power in the 1980s than an essential component of Reaganite governance. This, however, does not mean that Reagan’s racial backlash politics played no role in his policymaking. It was something he believed in, but, as a politician of great skill and calculation, Reagan made necessary compromises on race matters.

After Reagan became president in 1981, he pursued no onslaught against affirmative action. Some Republicans supported at least some forms of this policy, and the issue had done its necessary work for Reagan, helping him with certain segments of the electorate as he captured the White House. Instead of issuing executive orders curtailing affirmative action, Reagan chose the slower course of naming executive and judicial appointees who showed little zeal for civil rights enforcement in general. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, as well as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, now chaired by Clarence Thomas, became far less active. Most important were Reagan’s judicial nominees, including Sandra Day O’Connor, who became the stealth conservative on the U.S. Supreme Court, her reputation as a moderate—based largely on her unwillingness to overturn Roe v. Wade—belied by her lead role in decisions that undid certain affirmative action policies and the cold treatment she generally gave plaintiffs of color who alleged discrimination.

The racial politics of Reaganism are displayed in two legislative episodes. In 1982, Reagan signed a twenty-five-year extension of the Voting Rights Act, maintaining the need for “preclearance” with the U.S. government for any change in voting laws in a list of jurisdictions with ugly histories of political apartheid. Reagan’s popularity was at a low point; the deep recession of 1981-82 had put him back on his heels politically. Non-southern Republicans in Congress did not want to go to the mat to get the largely southern jurisdictions covered by the Act out from under the preclearance burden. So Reagan signed the extension, compromising his principles. (In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court vitiated the preclearance provision of the Act.)

In 1988, with Reagan’s presidency waning, he vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which Congress had passed after forging a bipartisan coalition designed to undo the Supreme Court’s Grove City College decision of 1984, which had opened the door to discrimination against all legally “protected classes” by private educational institutions and other organizations. By this time, Reagan had little clout on Capitol Hill and there was not much of a White House operation designed to sustain the veto. With no elections left to run, Reagan was making a point and demonstrating his convictions. His explanation for his veto—which Congress quickly overrode—was that the pending law would “unjustifiably extend the power of the federal government over the decisions and affairs of private organizations.” This was anti‒civil rights boilerplate; he could have used the same words to explain his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1984, when Reagan won an historic reelection victory, 85 percent of Americans casting votes were white. Reagan got about two thirds of their votes. This by itself spelled a huge win for him. This is not to say that white voters all voted for Reagan because they were white. But Reagan rode the white backlash—along with other major issues, to be sure—farther than anyone else ever did in American history, before or since. It is long since time that historians of Reagan, Reaganism, and the 1980s overcame their reluctance to tell this basic part of that era’s history plainly.

Stanford Law School’s Class of 1952 is the only one in history to have produced two U.S. Supreme Court justices

The years after World War II brought change to Stanford. Returning veterans on the GI Bill packed the campus. They and their classmates pursued their Stanford opportunity with the drive that would later mark them as the Greatest Generation.

Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ’48 MA ’48 LLB ’52, himself an Army Air Corps veteran, and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, LLB ’52, are the only Supreme Court justices in U.S. history to come from the same law school class.

Both were brilliant and hard-working, said fellow students contacted for a class history in the 1980s. Moreover, the Class of 1952 began law careers at an ideal place and time. The 1950s and 1960s saw tremendous growth, especially in California, and the state’s economic and political fortunes soared. For two Californian U.S. presidents, wrote David Lempert, JD/MBA ’83, the author of that history, “Stanford Law School and the West were logical places to search for Supreme Court nominees.”

Among Stanford’s law students in the postwar years were Shirley Hufstedler, LLB ’49, who became the first U.S. secretary of education; future senator Frank Church, ’47 JD ’50; John Ehrlichman, JD ’51, later adviser to President Richard Nixon; William Baxter, ’51 JD ’56, President Ronald Reagan’s antitrust chief in the Department of Justice; future Rep. Pete McCloskey, ’50 JD ’53, who co-authored the Endangered Species Act; and Warren Christopher, JD ’49, who became President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state.

Ironically, said the Class of 1952 alums, the legal education they received at Stanford was not yet geared toward jurisprudence, social or political issues, or ethics. Rather, it trained them for practice. The horizons of Stanford legal education had just begun to rise with the advent in 1946 of law school Dean Carl Spaeth, a former diplomat whose many institutional enhancements included the founding of the Stanford Law Review two years later. Both O’Connor – then Sandra Day – and Rehnquist served on the Review.

They studied, thanks to Spaeth, in a newly refurbished building opened in July 1950 on the Quad whose stained-glass windows and marble trim were replaced with fluorescent lighting and linoleum. The curriculum was traditional and rigorous. Rehnquist told Stanford Lawyer in 2005 that “that first year generally just enlarged my mind.”

“To the extent I ever had an intellectual awakening – and there may be some people who doubt the underlying premise – it was that first year of law school,” he told law students and alumni in 1973, a year after joining the high court.

Rehnquist entered Stanford as a transfer undergraduate in 1946 after war service in North Africa as a weather forecaster. He’d learned he liked warm weather, and Ohio’s Kenyon College didn’t fill the bill. Receiving Stanford aid as well as GI Bill funding,Rehnquist worked his way through via several jobs, including running the coffee stand in the law-student lounge and living as a resident assistant at nearby Menlo College for his room and board.

His classmate Allan Fink ’49 LLB ’52, had been command pilot of a B-24 Liberator with a dozen missions in Asia. As Stanford Lawyer remembered in 2013, Fink found the stress of law practice “nothing compared to being shot at.”

“We were very much in awe of the fact that we were freshmen in law school,” Rehnquist said. “A lot of us certainly weren’t young … We had been in the service in the Second World War, but this didn’t lessen our awe at the prospect of entering law school.”

He singled out for praise Professor John Hurlbut, who taught criminal law the first year and evidence in the third. While Rehnquist knew hard work and high standards, his third-year stint as Hurlbut’s assistant on an evidence text raised the bar.

In 1981, around the time of O’Connor’s nomination to the court, news sources reported that Rehnquist was No. 1 and O’Connor No. 3 in the historic class’s academic rankings. Several classmates claimed the No. 2 spot. According to the law school’s 60+ Moments in the History of Stanford Law School, “Despite many searches by many parties, no official records have been found, so the mystery lives on.”

What’s certain is that both belonged to the Order of the Coif, comprised of each class’s top 10 percent. Studying through the summers, Rehnquist graduated early in December 1951, but is still considered part of the 1952 class.

Despite competing for top marks, the two were friendly and went on picnics together.

“We dated some in the second year, and then we kind of went different ways,” Rehnquist told Stanford Lawyer in 2005.

O’Connor, who described herself in her 2004 Stanford University Commencement address as “a cowgirl from eastern Arizona,” boarded with Helen Cubberley, ’00, widow of the School of Education’s Ellwood Cubberley. She accelerated her studies under a program that then allowed Stanford students to complete a BA and a law degree in six years.

Later, O’Connor recalled the enormous influence imparted to her life by business-law Professor Harry Rathbun, ’16 Engr. ’20 JD ’29, who is today commemorated in the Stanford series “Harry’s Last Lecture,” and whose private teachings encompassed ethics, spirituality and the necessity of asking oneself “Who are we? Where are we going?”

“[Rathbun] was the first person ever to speak in my presence of how an individual could make a difference; how a single caring person can effectively help determine the course of events,” O’Connor said in May 2003. “I had not heard that before, really, and he put it forward in such a persuasive way that I think most of us came to believe it might be true, and to take seriously the notion that we could make a difference.”

After graduating as a star of the Class of 1952, however, O’Connor famously was unable to find any job in a private law firm except as a legal secretary.

“But the gender walls that blocked me out of the private sector were more easily hurdled in the public sector, ” she said in her 2004 Commencement address, “and I first found employment as a deputy county attorney of San Mateo County.

“While I was brought to the position by something short of choice, I came to realize almost immediately what a wonderful path I had taken. … Life as a public servant was more interesting. The work was more challenging. The encouragement and guidance from good mentors was more genuine. And the opportunities to take initiative and to see real results were more frequent.”

She became an assistant attorney general and an Arizona state senator and judge en route to the high court. “At every step of the way,” she said, “I felt the thrill of doing something right for a reason that was good.”

Appointed by Nixon, Rehnquist joined the high court in 1972 and became chief justice in 1986. He remained in that role until his death in 2005. When Reagan was searching for a Supreme Court appointee in 1981, Stanford Magazine later reported, Rehnquist “gave O’Connor, then an appellate judge in Arizona, his back-channel endorsement.”

....

wapo

Arts and Entertainment

How Sandra Day O’Connor became the most powerful woman in 1980s America

By Marjorie Williams March 29, 2016

Sandra Day O’Connor in 1982. (Associated Press)

To celebrate Women’s History Month, we’re opening up our archives to share interesting profiles of interesting women — as reported by some of our most interesting women writers. To follow more in the series, explore the #womenbywomen on Twitter, and share your own favorites using the hashtag.

Woman of the Hour: Sandra Day O’Connor — as the swing vote on a divided Supreme Court — is now the most influential woman in America. But don’t try telling her that.

By Al Kamen and Marjorie Williams

Washington Post Staff writers

June 11, 1989

It is fitting, for the first woman to crack the innermost sanctum of the male power culture, that the best stories about Sandra Day O’Connor center on golf.

The most emblematic, volunteered by four of her nearest relatives, concerns the way she took up the game, in her early forties. First she signed up for lessons at the Paradise Valley Country Club, to which she and her husband belonged. There, a 10-minute drive from her house, she worked with the club pro, and there, every Saturday, she hit bucket after bucket of balls on the driving range.

She did this week in and week out for two years, the story goes, before she actually played a game of golf. “She wasn’t going to do it until she was ready,” says O’Connor’s brother, Alan Day. “And when she was ready, she did a doggone good job of it.” Specifically, her family says, she shot under 90 her first time out. Justice O’Connor disclaims this score as apocryphal — but adds, in the interest of accuracy, “It was more like four years.”

[Why we’re combing our archives for women’s stories (from women)]

This is the signature tale about the most influential woman in America, containing as it does intimations of both excellence and obsession. When others are out making divots in the fairway and fools of themselves, Sandra Day O’Connor has more self-control. Enough self-control to defer gratification for as long as necessary. Enough self-consciousness not to want to be seen until she can be seen at peak form. Enough self-discipline to practice until she achieves that peak.

These are the qualities she has brought to all her undertakings, from law school to the Arizona Senate, from running the Phoenix Junior League to presiding over trials as a lower-court judge; the same qualities she has applied, in the personal realm, to friendship, to motherhood, to her battle with breast cancer.

They are also the qualities that brought her to the Supreme Court, where they have made her arguably the perfect “first woman” — fulfillment of that old feminist prophecy that for some time to come, women must work harder, be stronger, offer fewer signs of a vulnerable authenticity than men to make it in a man’s world.

Friends describe her as a warm, down-to-earth woman who bakes birthday cakes for her law clerks and went to a retirement home Christmas party last December to cheer a friend’s dying father. But even those closest to O’Connor describe her as private, reserved and self-contained. Says her good friend Jean Douglas, “She’s very self-sufficient and very in control.”

[What former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wants you to know about civics]

“I’ve never seen her lose control,” concurs her sister, Ann Fernandez. “I’ve just never seen it, and I doubt anybody else has.”

“All her life,” says her brother, “whatever she did, whether it was important, or unimportant, or semi-important, or very important, she just would do it to perfection . . . If you said, ‘The job is to wash dishes well,’ she would do it better than anyone else.”

Now, after almost eight years in Washington, she finds herself under intensified scrutiny as the decisive vote on a divided court. Until the retirement of one of the court’s aging liberals, O’Connor stands for a brief moment as the woman who will determine the direction of the court — and therefore the country — through such minefields as religious freedom, affirmative action, the death penalty and, especially, abortion.

[How Ruth Bader Ginsburg became ‘Notorious RBG’]

The woman whose nomination to the court in 1981 was attacked by anti-abortion activists is today nervously watched by abortion-rights supporters. As both sides tensely await the court’s decision this month in a Missouri case challenging the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion, their mutual uncertainty over O’Connor’s course is the perfect illustration of how opaque a figure she remains.

Her writings to date document a conservative but independent justice with no overarching ideology. Open-minded, yet cautious and detail-oriented, O’Connor has shown a tendency to approach each case as a problem to be solved — and to narrow the problem as much as possible.

Where once her mail was full of warmly appreciative letters from women inspired by her success, she is now deluged with mail urging her to dramatic measures — measures that would lift her from the symbolic role she earned on the day of her appointment and place her among those who have forever changed the substance of American life.

It is not at all clear that Sandra Day O’Connor, who asks so much of herself, welcomes the invitation.

Sandra Day O’Connor walks down the steps of the Supreme Court with Chief Justice Warren Berger in 1981, days before she was sworn in as the first female justice. (AP)

At the start of an oral argument, as the nine Supreme Court justices materialize like so many dark ghosts from behind the crimson curtains that stretch along the east end of the courtroom, Sandra Day O’Connor is a most reassuring apparition of change. Her femininity remains, to be sure, a startling contrast — made more dramatic by the fact that she is the only justice who does not wear glasses on the bench. But with her mild, flat voice and buttoned-down manner, with her gap-toothed smile and modest PTA hairdo, she could be Donna Reed at a gathering of kindly country doctors.

Her hands, though, are surprisingly square, almost bony — a reminder of her rural, western roots and of her sheer physical fortitude: Here, they remind us, is a woman who learned to brand cattle at the age of 8 and who each year takes her clerks on an “adventure” — something along the lines of a whitewater raft trip down the Youghiogheny River.

In the past 16 months that fortitude has been tested, by appendicitis and breast cancer. Late last fall, after O’Connor had a mastectomy, there were rumors that she might retire from the court. In addition to the surgery and subsequent chemotherapy, there was the fact that her husband, John, after seven years at the Washington firm of Miller & Chevalier, had moved to a firm that required his presence in the O’Connors‘ home town of Phoenix for about half of each month.

Close friends dismissed the speculation, noting that O’Connor, 59, received a clean bill of health after her chemotherapy and that the couple had just bought a new house in Chevy Chase. The real reason for their certainty, though, was this: Sandra Day O’Connor loves being an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

“I think she thinks she’s good at it,” says O’Connor’s good friend Nancy Ignatius. “I think she thinks she’s important to the country, and as a role model to women.”

She manages a staggering schedule. On top of the court workload, with the voluminous reading it requires, she takes seriously her role as a public figure, answering mail, delivering speeches and receiving visitors to the court, whether from abroad or from a local high school. She can get by, when she has to, on four hours of sleep. On the bench, her head sometimes bobs slightly in a noticeable tremor until she leans forward and rests her chin in her hand. But a query from an Associated Press reporter three years ago drew the response that she was “unaware of such a tendency,” and she seems as vigorous as ever.

She cuts no corners. To choose the four law clerks she hires each year, for example, she personally reviews the 100 or more resume’s sent to her chambers — a task most justices relegate to a screening committee — and then interviews a dozen or so finalists. And in reviewing her clerks’ draft opinions, she has them wheel into her office a library cart piled high with every case or law review article used in the drafting; she then personally checks every citation in each opinion.

O’Connor once told an interviewer, “A friend of mine was asked to describe me and said that with Sandra O’Connor there ain’t no Miller time. I think maybe that’s true.”

“I am overwhelmed,” says son Brian, 29, “at how much she gets accomplished.”

The O’Connors manage, too, a frenetic social life. A Supreme Court justice is, by definition, one of the handful of Washingtonians who have permanent claim to a place on the social “A” list; O’Connor’s added novelty value as “first woman” has made her one of the most clamored-after guests in town.

When they first came to Washington, with all three of their sons in or finished with college, the O’Connors sold their house in Phoenix and bought a condominium in the Kalorama area. They joined the F Street Club, the Waltz Club and the Chevy Chase Club, where O’Connor plays tennis and golf at least once a week, on top of an almost-daily exercise class. Together, the couple quickly set something like a local record for social ubiquity. They appear never to have developed the jaded selectivity that usually overtakes even the most enthusiastic newcomers, and to this day they go to so many parties that even some of their best friends are puzzled by it.

John O’Connor, a San Francisco native who belongs to California’s exclusive all-male Bohemian Club, has joined the Metropolitan Club here. Friends and family members say that while he is particularly enamored of Washington social life, it was professionally difficult for him to pull up stakes and move to Washington eight years ago, leaving a successful corporate practice in Phoenix. “The whole nature of the legal profession in Washington was very different for him,” says son Scott, 31. Until his father’s recent job change, Scott adds, “it was driving him nuts.” But on the whole, friends say, he has carried off the role of “Mr. Sandra Day O’Connor” with little discomfort — or at least with “less than you would expect,” in the words of a close friend.

He sometimes assumes an Irish brogue to regale dinner partners with jokes, which he collects. Says Scott, “He’ll jot down . . . the essence of the joke, and then expand on it a little bit, and have it typed up, and he’ll put it in his notebook. I don’t know how many feet of shelf space he’s got now, but he’s got reams and reams of jokes.”

John O’Connor is the entertainer of the family, but Sandra O’Connor too works hard — in a quieter way — at cultivating friendships here. She always remembers, friends say, to ask by name about a son or daughter; after a party, she invariably sends a handwritten note of thanks. “I think she must go straight home and write the note,” says her friend Nina Selin. “It always comes right away.”

Even when the court is not in session, the O’Connors maintain their headlong pace. Brian O’Connor tells of sometimes asking idly, come the spring, what his parents have planned for the summer. “And I will get in the mail a few weeks later, before the summer starts, an itinerary — June through August, to the hour, what she will be doing and my dad will be doing.”

Friends, family and professional associates all offer similar explanations for her enormous energy: “She has an ability to compartmentalize,” says Nancy Ignatius. “When she’s working, she’s working. When she’s playing tennis, she’s playing tennis. When she’s at a party, she’s at a party.”

“I am not a person who carries a lot of tension around,” O’Connor told an interviewer soon after she came to the Supreme Court. “I try to do the best job I can and then never look back.”

“She is not really introspective,” adds her sister, Ann. “I think life has been good to her. She has never had any problems. If you have these little problems, the things that happen to most of us, you spend some of your energy dealing with those things. She doesn’t spend time thinking about herself.”

Beyond confirming the statuses of her gold apprenticeship, O’Connor declined to be interviewed for this article. But friends who are asked about the source of her energy — and her reserve — send you to the Lazy B Ranch, a place almost unimaginably isolated by the standards of jet-age America. The Lazy B, like the famous woman who was formed there, is at once wide-open, unassuming and inaccessible.

The Days run more than 2,000 head of cattle on 198,000 acres in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico — parched, rocky land where little more than a hundred years ago the Fourth Cavalry fought the Chiricahua Apaches. Until Sandra was 7 years old, there was neither running water nor electricity in the ranch house, which was then a simple, four-room adobe structure. It is 25 miles from the nearest significant town, Duncan, Ariz. — the last eight of them covered by a small road off the main highway, a long, dusty trip through hillocks and fields of creosote bushes, yucca and broomweed.

Sandra, born in 1930, was raised virtually as the only child of Harry A. and Ada Mae Day: Ann and Alan wouldn’t come along until eight and 10 years after her. Harry was the son of a Vermont Yankee who had come west in search of adventure and the money to be had in cattle ranching; Ada Mae was the cultured daughter of an El Paso merchant and banker. While Ada Mae was one of the rare women college graduates of her day, Harry — who had planned to go to Stanford — was called back to the ranch in the late 1920s to untangle its mismanagement by a partner.

Sandra O’Connor’s earliest experiences, then, were of a rugged life made more austere by the family’s shaky finances. The Lazy B eventually prospered, but depression and drought contributed to a deep, deep financial conservatism that Harry passed on to his daughter. Says Alan Day’s wife, Sue, of the family, “They were raised to believe that if you had money, you traveled extensively, got a good education and lived frugally.” Although the ranch house has been extensively renovated and built onto, Harry Day’s old bedroom still contains the light he read by until his death in 1984 — a bedside lamp sporting a bare bulb.

Ada Mae, on the other hand, loved finery. “You never saw her in pants,” says Ann Fernandez of her mother. “She always wore hose and high heels,” even when she was fetching water from the well. She ordered her clothes from Neiman-Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, and each day, when she took Sandra the 25 miles to Duncan to pick up the mail, local women would gather at a corner just to see what she was wearing.

O’Connor’s parents subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Vogue, Time magazine, the Saturday Evening Post and more. Out of such adult fare, Ada Mae would read to her daughter for hour after hour. With no local children to play with, Sandra learned early to seek solace in books, and to make do with her own company.

It is not quite true that, as Ann Fernandez says, O’Connor’s life has been without significant pain. At age 6, having learned to love the grudging Eden of the Lazy B, she was expelled from it: Because there was no decent school within a reasonable distance of the ranch, she was sent to El Paso to live with her maternal grandmother.

Brian O’Connor describes this as “initially devastating” to his mother. Scott says, “My mom would just cry and cry and pine away for being at home.”

O’Connor eventually learned to like El Paso, by most reports, and did so well in the local schools that she skipped two grades. She found a second mother in her strong-minded grandmother, Mamie Wilkey, and was at least able to spend holidays and summers at the ranch. But leaving her parents at such a young age accounts in part, family members say, for her precocity and cemented her tendency to rely only on herself.

She returned to the Lazy B for just one year, in eighth grade; her father told an interviewer that after the births of her brother and sister, she begged to go back to the ranch, distressed at not being “part of the family.” Each day she had to take a school bus most of the 32 miles to Lordsburg, N.M. — an experience she has cited to explain her loathing for busing as a social remedy.

Even in her years away, “she was always very much my dad’s favorite,” says Alan. “Sandra was just the apple of his eye.” Harry Day had taught her, by the time she was 8, to ride with the cowboys, mend fences, drive a truck and fire her own .22 rifle. From him she learned too that work was a seven-days-a-week, dawn-to-dusk proposition.

Day’s politics were decidedly conservative: He couldn’t abide Franklin D. Roosevelt, his children say, and he was one of the few Republicans in all of Greenlee County. Harry Day also preached a distrust of lawyers:The family had gotten embroiled in a lawsuit when Harry took over management of the ranch, and it dragged on for a decade, consuming some half a million dollars before he was able to settle it. “Those lawyers were not going to let that money get away from them,” Harry Day wrote in some brief notes summarizing the ranch’s history.

Scott O’Connor says, “My mom going to Stanford and then on to law school was sort of the fulfillment of my grandfather’s dream. He was going to go to Stanford, so that was part one. And then part two was, she became an attorney, in part because this was never going to happen to us again.”

Her setting out, at the age of 16, was like the traditional quest of the eldest son. Her career, though, would mark her as the daughter of a new age.

Brooksley Born, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor at a 1983 reception for the 14th annual Conference on Women and the Law. (Harry Naltchayan for The Washington Post)

“It wasn’t until the ’60s that women began to bring to the forefront the continuing concerns that they had about equal opportunity,” Sandra Day O’Connor told the Saturday Evening Post after her appointment to the Supreme Court.

“I am sure that but for that effort, I would not be serving in this job.”

It is about as close as she has come to endorsing the women’s movement — a campaign in which she has been less than a participant but far more than a bystander. She has been only intermittently a pioneer in a career that is marked, above all, by her capacity to distill the best from the two generations she spans — taking some of the old routes traditionally available to women, such as government work and community volunteerism, as well as the new ones opening all around her. The ruling principle of her career has been preparation; its major thread seems to have drawn her toward jobs that allowed ever more mastery over her surroundings.

Fresh out of law school, engaged to fellow law-review editor John Jay O’Connor III, she found that none of the large California firms would hire a woman, so she went to work as deputy county attorney for San Mateo County. After John’s mandatory military service in Germany, where Sandra worked for the Army Quartermaster Corps, the couple settled in Phoenix. He took a good job in corporate law with an eminent firm — while she opened up her own tiny practice with one other lawyer.

The O’Connors had in the meantime started a family, having their children, with characteristic efficiency, at roughly two-year intervals. After the second child, Brian, was born in 1960, Sandra O’Connor gave up her practice and for five years became — at least technically — a prosperous Paradise Valley wife, mother and homemaker. The third son, Jay, was born in 1962.

O’Connor quickly began working as much as ever — but in volunteer posts in which she could control her hours. She became president of the Phoenix Junior League, kept her hand in as an appointed trustee in the occasional bankruptcy case, a volunteer juvenile-court referee and a writer and grader of state bar exams. She also got involved in local Republican politics, serving as a precinct committeewoman in 1964, when family friend Barry Goldwater ran for president.

In 1965, she went back to work, as an assistant attorney general in Arizona. And in 1969, she was chosen to serve out the term of a state senator who had resigned to take a job in the Nixon administration. In this position — as in her later appointment to the Arizona Court of Appeals — she succeeded a woman who had done well in the job, marking it as “a woman’s seat.”

But O’Connor was truly a trailblazer when, after running for and winning the seat herself in 1970 and 1972, she was elected Senate majority leader in 1973 — the first woman majority leader in the country. She was known for “an immense negotiating skill,” says Phoenix lawyer Bud Jacobson. “She had a mind like a steel trap,” says Sen. Pete Corpstein, who was then in the House. “She drove a hard bargain, and didn’t cave in.”

Much was made, during O’Connor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, of her purportedly pro-abortion votes as a state senator. She managed to explain away the appearance of having supported abortion rights — she said she voted against a resolution calling for a pro-life amendment to the Constitution, for example, because it was an extraneous rider to an unrelated bill. But what was less well understood was how thoroughly her record marked her, in Arizona terms, as a mainstream Republican moderate.

Says Democratic U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, then also active in state politics, “She was considered, by the Democrats, a progressive Republican . . . willing to address mental health, willing to address education issues, and not just slam the door.”

“I don’t know anybody, Republican or Democrat, who ever thought Sandra was a right-wing Republican,” says Jacobson, a Democrat.

Arizona has always had more than its share of Evan Mecham Republicans, but they would not dominate the party until the late 1970s. Earlier, the Republican establishment, in the words of former Democratic governor Bruce Babbitt, “had been economically conservative, but not out on the far right on cultural issues at all.” And Sandra O’Connor, as a pillar of her community, chaired the board of the Heard Museum and was active in support of the local public television station, a student-run effort at Arizona State University. Her husband was also involved in such establishmentarian good works as the Legal Aid Society; he was a popular man to help out with local fund-raisers and even emceed two affairs for the local Planned Parenthood chapter. Today, Sandra O’Connor’s sister is on the board of Planned Parenthood’s Tucson chapter.

O’Connor supported legislation to make family planning services universally available, to make community-property laws fairer to women, and to restrict state aid to private schools. Initially, she supported the Equal Rights Amendment.

Her approach to politics foreshadowed her approach to the Supreme Court. Says former senator Ray Rottas, now state treasurer, “She was strictly an issue-oriented person . . . If the program was good for the state, it didn’t make a whole lot of difference to her which side initiated the issue.”

The one area where O’Connor notably anticipated the conservative revolution of the 1980s was in her belief in minimal, fiscally conservative government. “She used to say the legislature should meet every five years, and that there ought to have to be a three-quarters majority to pass anything,” says Jacobson. One of her major legislative initiatives was a proposal to cap state spending as a percentage of income — an idea that came from Gov. Ronald Reagan’s efforts in California.

She was not always popular among her colleagues, whose bills she rewrote when they didn’t satisfy her exacting standards. “She had frustration in the state legislature, to some degree, at the skill some of her colleagues occasionally lacked,” says Scott O’Connor. Babbitt, who eventually appointed O’Connor to the Arizona Court of Appeals, says that as a senator she could best be termed a technocrat. “She was not a clubhouse politician,” he says. “She was a little incongruous at a political rally, standing in front of the troops — much more at home in a committee room than at a rally.”

At the end of her second full term, she resigned from the Senate for a judgeship in Maricopa County Superior Court. Many saw it as a step down for her, but it was a move toward an arena in which she could increase her control.

She earned a good reputation as a tough trial judge who ran a tight ship. “She didn’t have much use for lawyers who came and said, ‘This is the right thing to do,’ ” says Hattie Babbitt, a Phoenix lawyer who tried her first case in O’Connor’s courtroom and urged her husband to promote O’Connor. “She wanted a lawyer to say, ‘This is the right thing to do, and here are 25 pieces of precedent to support it.’ ” She gave brutally short shrift to attorneys who were unprepared, and in biennial bar evaluations earned her lowest marks in the area of “courtesy to litigants and lawyers.”

She turned down urgent pleas from the party establishment to run for governor in 1978, despite the fact that she had grown tired, in Scott’s words, of “all the shenanigans of the primary trial court level.” This appears to be the point where she turned decisively away from politics. Says Barry Goldwater, one of those who urged her on, “I was never convinced she was thinking about it seriously.”

More to her taste was the offer, a year later, of a seat on the Arizona Court of Appeals. “It was so much more cerebral” than the lower court, says Scott. “You were dealing with an intellectual exercise rather than with circumstances beyond your control.”

Interestingly, though, O’Connor never sought out the seat on the appeals court — without which she could not have been a candidate for the Supreme Court a year and a half later, when President Reagan was searching for a qualified woman. “She didn’t send out any signal of interest, much less send in an application,” former governor Babbitt says; he solicited her application. “There wasn’t any evidence of the raw fire of ambition,” Babbitt adds. “I just think that in this case, the intense part of her ambition is focused against an internal standard rather than an outside goal or standard.”

Says Hattie Babbitt, “I don’t think it would be fair to say that, for Sandra, drive was one of those things that meant she must get to a specific goal. The kind of drive she has is, she’s very smart, and very organized, and she would always want to be very good at what she does. You can do that and not be in the right place at the right time. But she did and she was.”

On July 6, 1981, at the age of 51, Sandra Day O’Connor was offered what is to most lawyers a life’s dream. Of her outward reaction, Brian O’Connor says, “She was so reserved and calm and just, ‘Well, let’s see what this is all about.’ ”

Sandra Day O’Connor in Washington in 1981. (Dennis Cook/AP)

“You talk about cramming for an exam,” says Scott O’Connor. “You’ve never seen somebody cram the way she crammed” for her Senate confirmation hearings. Then — with scant background in constitutional law, and with no time to practice her strokes — O’Connor began reading briefs for her first term on the court even before the hearings ended and the Senate confirmed her, 99-0.

During that first term, court observers sensed she was uncomfortable in her new job. At oral arguments, O’Connor often read what seemed to be questions prepared in advance and appeared unwilling — or unable, some detractors said — to ask the obvious follow-ups. Scott O’Connor confirms that the early months of the job took a toll, though one that went unspoken. “At the end of the first term. . . you could just look at her and see she was tired. And that kind of shocked us, because we had never quite seen her that way. . . That might have been the only indication that, yes, it was a big burden on her. And that she was worried about pulling her weight and all of that.”

But by the 1982 term, court-watchers noticed a new confidence in her questioning. Says Scott, “By the end of the second term, she just was herself again, had figured the system out, had gotten into the routine, and realized that she was going to make it and do just fine.”

She was ready to play.

Now O’Connor is an insistent questioner who can skewer an attorney she feels is evasive or unprepared. While she is not known for a light touch, she is capable of an occasional excursion into whimsy, as when Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist announced last June that she would render the court’s decision in a case called Volkswagenwerk Aktiengesellschaft v. Schlunk. He pronounced the case in such elaborately correct German that she responded, with a sheepish smile, “Jawohl.”

But beyond her performance in the theatrical forum of oral arguments, it is difficult, even after almost eight full terms, to generalize about O’Connor’s tenure on the court. Few have called her a brilliant theoretician on the order of Oliver Wendell Holmes or an eloquent writer, as Antonin Scalia has shown he can be. Legal scholars say she is a conservative along the lines of former justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. and the late John M. Harlan, whose careers were distinguished by a devotion to pragmatic resolution of the issues before them.

She writes 16 or 17 opinions a year, on average, along with 20 dissenting or concurring opinions — although for O’Connor, as for most justices, “writing” usually means editing a draft written by a clerk. She focuses closely on the legal analysis to make sure it satisfies her, paying less attention to stylistic detail. Critics say her opinions have no passion, display no lofty vision and lack grace or personal tone; even when she writes in dissent — a position that traditionally enables a losing justice, with no need to preserve a majority, to let loose — she rarely deviates from her characteristic restraint.

She has been as hard-line as any conservative member of the court on law-and-order issues. And, as widely predicted on the basis of her state government service, she has been a firm champion of state power against encroachment from the federal government, above all federal courts. She has been especially impatient with federal judges intervening to release state prisoners who claim their constitutional rights have been violated. For her, this is a double sin — letting guilty criminals go free and stepping on state judicial turf.

In an early sex discrimination case, however, O’Connor showed that she would be willing to break ranks with conservatives on civil rights and other social issues. That case, in which she wrote her best-known opinion of her first term, involved a state-supported university in Mississippi that barred men from its school of nursing. O’Connor, giving the liberals her key vote, wrote a 5-4 opinion saying that policy violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. Laws discriminating on the basis of sex, she wrote, would be allowed only if there was an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for them. Women’s groups took it as a sign that O’Connor was more ally than enemy in the area of sex discrimination — a hope that has mostly been borne out.

At the outset, O’Connor seemed a certain ally of her old Stanford Law School classmate Rehnquist and of then-Chief Justice Warren E. Burger on the conservative wing of the court, voting more often with them during her first term than with any other justices. But her alignment with them seemed to lessen each term. While continuing on balance to chart a conservative course, she emerged as a justice who looked to resolve each case and no more, one with no overarching philosophy that might preordain a result. She drifted toward alignment with the centrist Powell, voting more often with him, by the 1985 term, than with Rehnquist or Burger. While Powell remained more liberal than O’Connor, his approach coincided with her own view of what the court, and each justice, should do to decide a case.

Former clerks praise what they say is O’Connor’s genuine willingness to consider any argument her clerks bring to her. And because she does not screen her clerks for any particular ideology, one or more of her clerks each term is usually more liberal than she is. If in the end she disagrees, she will say quietly, almost apologetically, “Well, I’m sorry, but I just can’t agree with you.”

She seems suspicious of bold solutions from either the left or the right: In cases where she votes with Rehnquist or Scalia, at one end of the spectrum, or with liberal Justice William J. Brennan Jr., at the other, she often writes a concurring opinion that shows a different reasoning — trying to find a middle ground and attempting to narrow the scope of the ruling.

In a 1988 case asking whether murderers under 16 should be executed, for example, O’Connor declined to join the opinion written by Brennan, who had four votes to bar such executions. O’Connor concurred but found a way to narrow the issue so that she did not categorically rule out such executions in the future.

In cases concerning the First Amendment’s often contradictory admonitions not to “establish” religion or inhibit it, O’Connor has often sided with liberals in the face of government attempts to restrict religious expression — such as when the Air Force refused to let a psychologist wear a yarmulke. But she has stood with the conservatives to allow government funding of programs that may aid religious institutions.

O’Connor, who was baptized in the Episcopal Church and attends Sunday services at the Bethlehem Chapel in the Washington Cathedral, has characteristically searched for a middle ground in this difficult area. In a 1984 Rhode Island case involving a government-sponsored Nativity scene,O’Connor joined a 5-4 ruling by Burger allowing the display, but she developed in a separate opinion the idea, since adopted by the court, that the test of the constitutionality of government actions should be whether the government was “endorsing” a religion, not simply whether it was doing something that might aid religion in some way.

O’Connor’s centrist approach is perhaps best demonstrated in the area of affirmative action for women and minorities, in which she has formed a majority endorsing the use of affirmative action but only where there is clear evidence of past discrimination and where the program is “narrowly tailored” to remedy the wrong.

In the most sensitive area of all, abortion, O’Connor seems to have been searching for middle ground in an area where few believe it exists. She has criticized the legal analysis underlying the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling establishing a constitutional right to abortion. But, despite ample opportunity, she has never joined dissenting opinions calling for the states to be given the power once again to ban abortion.

With the moderate Powell’s retirement two years ago, and his replacement by the staunchly conservative Anthony M. Kennedy, O’Connor became the pivotal vote on abortion and several other emotionally volatile issues on which the rest of the court is divided 4-4. In the present term alone, she may cast the deciding vote in closely watched cases concerning the execution of killers who are mentally retarded or under 18; in a new case involving public displays of a Nativity scene and a menorah; and, of course, in the abortion case from Missouri.

And the division of the court gives not just her vote but her reasoning a controlling importance in any 5-4 case where she writes her own concurring opinion instead of joining the plurality opinion. In the affirmative-action area, for example, Brennan might have O’Connor’s vote as his fifth. But if she does not agree with his reasoning and writes a separate concurrence, lower courts will look to her opinion rather than Brennan’s for guidance, knowing that as long as they follow her views, their decisions will be upheld by the court.

The law, in such a situation, will be whatever Sandra Day O’Connor says it is.

O’Connor lunches with President Reagan in the Oval Office. (Lucian Perkins for The Washington Post)

“Whether we will lead only a family, or a handful of friends, and where and how we will lead is up to us, our views and our talents,” O’Connor told a graduating class at her alma mater in 1982. “But the hour will come for each of us, and because of this, we surely must also know that the very nature of humanity and society, regardless of its size or complexity, will always turn on the act of the individual and, therefore, on the quality of that individual.”

With Sandra Day O’Connor’s hour at hand, American society will, in a very real sense, find itself turning on the quality of her judgment. It is ironic that the hour should have come at a time when her legendary control has been, if not threatened, at the very least challenged.

In the past few months, O’Connor has seen the deaths of her mother and a beloved uncle. O’Connor presided over a family service, in April, to scatter her mother’s ashes at the top of Round Mountain, which overlooks all of the Lazy B. “That’s the only time I’ve ever seen her shed a tear,” says her sister-in-law, Sue Day.

And since October she has confronted the shock of breast cancer — and with it the loss of a breast, the miseries of chemotherapy and the suddenly uncertain future that faces anyone who has had cancer. It has been, her sister says, “the first major crisis of her life.” The justice has told friends that the two weeks between the time she learned she had cancer and the time she decided on her treatment were the worst of her life: The language of doctors, with all those possible outcomes and vague prognoses and admissions that they have no answers, only odds, is so different from the language of lawyers.

She dealt with it, though, as she has dealt with other hurdles: “She took her cancer as a challenge,” her sister continues, “learning everything she could about it, reading every book, talking with people and making the necessary decisions about her treatment and options.”

The night before her scheduled mastectomy last October, O’Connor kept a long-standing commitment to deliver a lecture at Washington & Lee University, making the seven-hour round trip to Lexington, Va., by car.

Two weeks after the surgery, she was out on the golf course, angry at herself when her drives lacked their usual power. Three weeks after it, she was playing tennis, grimacing a little when she had to hit an overhead. One morning last December, in the course of her chemotherapy treatment, she was heard to mention that she felt a little tired. “Welcome to the human race,” her husband replied.

Says her friend Jean Douglas, “You want to help her so much, and she says, ‘Oh, no, I’m fine, there’s nothing wrong’ . . . She keeps everything quiet. She wants to keep everything to herself. It gives you quite a stoic person.”

Nancy Ignatius, who has herself struggled with breast cancer, agrees. “I think Sandra would rather not be seen to need help . . . There’s not a lot that one can do for Sandra.”

But at least once, she asked. The day after her surgery, O’Connor’s doctors told her there was a small spread of cancer to her lymph nodes, requiring chemotherapy. Ignatius returned home from an engagement to find a message on her answering machine saying, simply, “Come. I need you.”

After her chemotherapy, O’Connor got a clean bill of health. “All the tests have been negative and the prognosis for total recovery is excellent,” she said in a recent statement through a court press officer. “I do not plan to leave the court.”

Says her sister, “She feels her health is good now, and she doesn’t spend time worrying about it but instead has gone on with her life as if it never happened.” Her attitude, says Ignatius, is, “It was a thing that started and ended and now one goes on to something else.”

For Sandra Day O’Connor, “something else,” in the late spring of 1989, is the great opportunity, or burden, of being the most powerful woman in the country. Her decisive position in the center of the court will last only as long as the court’s composition remains the same: It seems almost certain that President Bush will have the chance to replace one of the court’s elderly liberals, and when he does, O’Connor will become overnight just another member of a conservative majority — one whose narrowly focused concurrences will mean nothing in a 6-3 vote.

In O’Connor’s shoes, a different man or woman might be tempted to seize the moment: History abounds with Supreme Court justices, from James C. McReynolds to Hugo L. Black, who have hankered visibly to leave their mark on the law of the land. But now that her own time has come, Sandra Day O’Connor seems inclined to deny it — and possibly to resent it.

Friends and acquaintances say she is angered by the blizzard of mail she has received on abortion. Attempts to influence a justice’s vote, she believes, show a profound misunderstanding of how the court works and of what its role is.

“I don’t think it affects her,” says her son Brian of the pressures bearing in on her now. “I don’t think it has any effect one way or the other.” But friends say she bridles at being called the swing vote — and especially at any suggestion that, however temporarily, her word carries more weight than another justice’s. And it is entirely typical of her to be unswayed by the passions around her, to quarrel, instead, with the premise of those passions.

She seems likely to meet this latest, largest challenge, then, as she has met all the others: industriously, equably and without letting anything break her stride.

Last Christmas, according to Scott O’Connor, the justice’s favorite gift, from her husband, was a set of full-body Gore-Tex rain gear. She wanted it to wear on the golf course, so that even the elements couldn’t stop her.

“Her time is so precious,” says Scott, “that she’s not going to let a little thing like rain get in the way of her exercise.”

Members of the U.S. Supreme Court pose for a formal group portrait in April 1988. (Bob Daugherty for The Associated Press)

During oral argument April 26 in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the Missouri case challenging the court’s landmark 1973 abortion ruling, one lawyer was instructing the Supreme Court on the history of abortion bans. Historically, he said, the line was drawn at “quickening or viability.”

“Well, there is a difference, is there not, between those two?” asked Sandra Day O’Connor, the only justice for whom “quickening,” when fetal movement is first felt, is more than an abstraction.

In a confluence of history, politics and serendipity, the court’s only female member will likely cast the deciding vote this term on whether the right to abortion should be severely restricted or overturned.

O’Connor, who spoke in her 1981 Senate confirmation hearings of her “abhorrence” of abortion, has indicated that she would allow states to substantially restrict access to abortion. Despite extensive writing on the subject, however, she has left unclear just how far she thinks such restrictions may go— and whether she believes there is any fundamental right to abortion. At times she has called such a right a “limited” one. At other times she has carefully prefaced her discussions by saying that she was assuming for the sake of argument that such a fundamental right exists — and even then said substantial restrictions were permissible.But while she has written a blistering attack on the analytical framework of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a woman’s right to abortion, she has not joined dissenting opinions by the other conservative justices calling to allow states to ban abortion.

In a 1983 dissent, she wrote that the state “has compelling interests in . . . protecting potential human life” from the moment of conception — not simply from the time of viability, as set forth in Roe. State regulations, she said, need only be “rational” and should be upheld unless they impose “an undue burden on the abortion decision.” She defined “undue burden” as an “absolute obstacle” or “severe limitation” on abortion, not something that “may inhibit abortions to some degree.” O’Connor further argued, in considering a regulation that imposed a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, that even if the regulation was assumed to be unduly burdensome, the state’s “compelling interests” justified it.

Under these standards, O’Connor presumably would uphold at least some of the restrictions at issue in the Missouri case before the court, such as a ban on abortions in public facilities. Her options in the case range from an affirmation of a fundamental right to abortion (unlikely, in the view of most court observers) to a partial upholding of Missouri’s restrictions, all the way through to a complete reversal of Roe v. Wade. O’Connor’s generally cautious approach to decision-making, and her questions at the oral argument in April, indicate she might prefer to resolve the Missouri case without confronting Roe, waiting for another case, and perhaps a sixth vote, to overturn or dramatically undercut the 1973 ruling.

As O’Connor has pondered her position in Webster, she has been looking forward to the birth of her first grandchild in October. In pointing out the coincidence, the father-to-be, Scott O’Connor, says that he and his wife “struggled for three years to get pregnant,” a struggle his mother followed closely. “It’s ironic that the issue is all the people wanting to terminate pregnancy, and we couldn’t do it without trying for three years and lots of medical help,” he says. “We spent three years trying to do something that half of America is trying to prevent.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Day_O%27Connor

Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26, 1930) is a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who served from her appointment in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan until her retirement in 2006. She was the first woman to serve on the Court.^[5]

Prior to O'Connor's tenure on the Court, she was a judge and an elected official in Arizona serving as the first female Majority Leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate.^[6] Upon her nomination to the Court, O'Connor was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. On July 1, 2005, she announced her intention to retire effective upon the confirmation of a successor.^[7] Samuel Alito was nominated to take her seat in October 2005, and joined the Court on January 31, 2006.

Considered a federalist and a moderate Republican, O'Connor tended to approach each case narrowly without arguing for sweeping precedents. She most frequently sided with the Court's conservative bloc; she was regarded as having the swing opinion in many decisions. She often wrote concurring opinions that limited the reach of the majority holding. Her majority opinions in landmark cases include Grutter v. Bollinger and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. She also wrote in part the per curiam majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, and was one of three co-authors of the lead opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

From 2005 to 2012, O'Connor was Chancellor of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, where she was made an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa in 2008.^[8]Several publications have named her among the most powerful women in the world.^[9][10] On August 12, 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States, by President Barack Obama.

Early life and education

Sandra Day was born in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of Harry Alfred Day, a rancher, and Ada Mae (Wilkey).^[11] She grew up on a 198,000-acre cattle ranch near Duncan, Arizona.^[12] The ranch was nine miles from the nearest paved road.^[13] The family home did not have running water or electricity until Sandra was seven years old.^[14] She hunted from a young age, using a .22-caliber rifle to shoot jackrabbits for food.^[13] She began driving as soon as she could see over the dashboard and had to learn to change flat automobile tires herself.^[12][13] Sandra had two younger siblings, a sister and a brother, respectively eight and ten years her junior.^[14] Her sister was Ann Day, who served in the Arizona Legislature.^[15] She later wrote a book with her brother, H. Alan Day, Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American West (2002), about her childhood experiences on the ranch. For most of her early schooling, O'Connor lived in El Paso with her maternal grandmother,^[14] and attended school at theRadford School for Girls, a private school.^[citation ^needed] The family cattle ranch was too far from schools, although O'Connor was able to return to the ranch for holidays and the summer.^[14] O'Connor spent her eighth-grade year living at the ranch and riding a bus 32 miles to school.^[14] She graduated sixth in her class at Austin High School in El Paso in 1946.^[16]

Sandra Day attended Stanford University, where she received her B.A. in Economics in 1950.^[17] She continued at the Stanford Law School for her law degree in 1952.^[17]There, she served on the Stanford Law Review with its presiding editor-in-chief, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was the class valedictorian^[18]and whom she briefly dated during law school.^[19] She has stated that she graduated third in her law school class,^[20] though Stanford's official position is that the law school did not rank students in 1952.^[21]

Early career and marriage

On December 20, 1952, six months after graduating from law school, she married John Jay O'Connor III,^[22] whom she had met at Stanford Law School.^[13]

Upon graduation from law school, while her classmate Rehnquist went on to clerk for the Supreme Court, O'Connor had difficulty finding a paying job as an attorney because of her gender.^[23] O'Connor found employment as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California, after she offered to work for no salary and without an office, sharing space with a secretary.^[24] She worked with San Mateo County district attorney Louis Dematteis and deputy district attorney Keith Sorensen.^[22]

When her husband was drafted, O'Connor decided to pick up and go with him to work in Germany as a civilian attorney for the Army's Quartermaster Corps.^[25] They remained there for three years before returning to the states where they settled inMaricopa County, Arizona,to begin their family. They had three sons: Scott (born 1958), Brian (born 1960), and Jay (born 1962).^[26][14] Following Brian's birth, O'Connor took a five-year hiatus from the practice of law.^[14]

She volunteered in various political organizations, such as the Maricopa County Young Republicans, and served on the presidential campaign for Arizona Senator Barry M. Goldwater in 1964.^[27][14]

O'Connor served as assistant Attorney General of Arizona from 1965 to 1969.^[14] In 1969, the governor of Arizona appointed O'Connor to fill a vacancy in the Arizona Senate.^[14] She ran for and won the election for the seat the following year.^[14] By 1973, she became the first woman to serve as Arizona's or any state's Majority Leader.^[28][29] She developed a reputation as a skilled negotiator and a moderate. After serving two full terms, O'Connor decided to leave the Senate.^[29]

In 1974, O'Connor was elected to the Maricopa County Superior Court^[30] serving from 1975 to 1979 when she was elevated to the Arizona State Court of Appeals. She served on the Court of Appeals-Division One until 1981 when she was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan.^[31]

Supreme Court career:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Appointment:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Supreme Court Justice-nominee Sandra Day O'Connor talks with President Ronald Reagan outside the White House, July 15, 1981.

On July 7, 1981, Reagan – who had pledged during his 1980 presidential campaign to appoint the first woman to the Court^[32] – announced he would nominate O'Connor as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Potter Stewart.^[33] O'Connor received notification from President Reagan of her nomination on the day prior to the announcement and did not know that she was a finalist for the position.^[24]

Reagan wrote in his diary on July 6, 1981: "Called Judge O'Connor and told her she was my nominee for supreme court. Already the flak is starting and from my own supporters. Right to Life people say she is pro abortion. She declares abortion is personally repugnant to her. I think she'll make a good justice."^[34] O'Connor told Reagan she did not remember whether she had supported the view of repealing Arizona's law banning abortion.^[35] However, she had cast a preliminary vote in the Arizona State Senate in 1970 in favor of a bill to repeal the state's criminal-abortion statute.^[36] In 1974, O'Connor had opined against a measure to prohibit abortions in some Arizona hospitals.^[36] Pro-life and religious groups opposed O'Connor's nomination because they suspected, correctly, she would not be willing to overturn Roe v Wade.^[37] U.S. Senate Republicans, including Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Steve Symms of Idaho, and Jesse Helms of North Carolina called the White House to express their discontent over the nomination; Nickles said he and "other profamily Republican senators would not support" O'Connor.^[37]Helms, Nickles, and Symms nevertheless voted for confirmation.^[38]

Reagan formally nominated O'Connor on August 19, 1981.^[39]

O'Connor being sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger

Conservative activists such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Howard Phillips, and Peter Gemma also spoke out against the nomination. Gemma called the nomination "a direct contradiction of the Republican platform to everything that candidate Reagan said and even President Reagan has said in regard to social issues."^[40] Gemma, the executive director of the National Pro-Life Political Action Committee, had sought to delay O'Connor's confirmation by challenging her record, including support for the Equal Rights Amendment.^[41]

O'Connor's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee began on September 9, 1981.^[42] It was the first televised confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court Justice.^[43] The confirmation hearing lasted three days and largely focused on the issue of abortion.^[44] When asked, O'Connor refused to telegraph her views on abortion, and she was careful not to leave the impression that she supported abortion rights.^[45] The Judiciary Committee approved O'Connor with seventeen votes in favor and one vote of present.^[44]

On September 21, O'Connor was confirmed by the U.S. Senate with a vote of 99–0;^[33][46] Senator Max Baucus of Montana was absent from the vote, and sent O'Connor a copy of A River Runs Through It by way of apology.^[47] In her first year on the Court she received over 60,000 letters from the public, more than any other justice in history.^[48]

Supreme Court jurisprudence

Voting record and deciding votes:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Justice O'Connor presents Alberto Gonzales to the audience after swearing him in as U.S. Attorney General, as Becky Gonzales looks on.

Sandra Day O'Connor was part of the federalism movement and approached each case as narrowly as possible,^[citation ^needed] avoiding generalizations that might later "paint her into a corner" for future cases.^[citation ^needed] Initially, her voting record aligned closely with the conservative William Rehnquist (voting with him 87% of the time her first three years at the Court).^[49] From that time until 1998, O'Connor's alignment with Rehnquist ranged from 93.4% to 63.2%, hitting above 90% in three of those years.^[50] In nine of her first sixteen years on the Court, O'Connor voted with Rehnquist more than with any other justice.^[50]

Later on, as the Court's make-up became more conservative (e.g., Anthony Kennedy replacing Lewis Powell, and Clarence Thomas replacing Thurgood Marshall), O'Connor often became the swing vote on the Court. However, she usually disappointed the Court's more liberal bloc in contentious 5–4 decisions: from 1994 to 2004, she joined the traditional conservative bloc of Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Thomas 82 times; she joined the liberal bloc of John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer only 28 times.^[51]

O'Connor's relatively small^[52] shift away from conservatives on the Court seems to have been due at least in part to Thomas's views.^[53] When Thomas and O'Connor were voting on the same side, she would typically write a separate opinion of her own, refusing to join his.^[54] In the 1992 term, O'Connor did not join a single one of Thomas' dissents.^[55]

Some notable cases in which O'Connor joined the majority in a 5-4 decision were:

McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93 (2003), upholding the constitutionality of most of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill regulating "soft money" contributions.
Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003), O'Connor wrote the opinion of the Court in Grutter and joined the majority in Gratz. In this pair of cases, the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions program was held to have engaged in unconstitutional reverse discrimination, but the more-limited type of affirmative action in the University of Michigan Law School's admissions program was held to have been constitutional.
Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003): O'Connor wrote the majority opinion, with the four conservative justices concurring, that a 50-year to life sentence without parole for petty shoplifting a few children's videotapes under California's three strikes law was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment because there was no "clearly established" law to that effect. Leandro Andrade, a Latino nine year Army veteran and father of three, will be eligible for parole in 2046 at age eighty-seven.
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), O'Connor joined the majority holding that the use of school vouchers for religious schools did not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.
United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995): O'Connor joined a majority holding unconstitutional the Gun-Free School Zones Act as beyond Congress's Commerce Clause power.
Bush v. Gore,531 U.S. 98 (2000), O'Connor joined with four other justices on December 12, 2000, to rule on the Bush v. Gore case that ceased challenges to the results of the 2000 presidential election (ruling to stop the ongoing Florida election recount and to allow no further recounts). This case effectively ended Gore's hopes to become president. Some legal scholars^[who?] have argued that she should have recused herself from this case, citing several reports that she became upset when the media initially announced that Gore had won Florida, with her husband explaining that they would have to wait another four years before retiring to Arizona.^[56]

O'Connor played an important role in other notable cases, such as:

Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989): This decision upheld as constitutional state restrictions on second trimester abortions that are not necessary to protect maternal health, contrary to the original trimester requirements in Roe v. Wade. Although O'Connor joined the majority, which also included Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy and Byron White, in a concurring opinion she refused to explicitly overturn Roe.

On February 22, 2005, with Rehnquist and Stevens (who were senior to her) absent, she became the senior justice presiding over oral arguments in the case of Kelo v. City of New London and becoming the first woman to do so before the Court.^[citation ^needed]

First Amendment

Sandra Day O'Connor was unpredictable in many of her court decisions, especially those regarding First Amendment Establishment Cause issues. This might be due to the fact that instead of letting herself be guided by her conservative ideologies, she decided on a case-by-case basis and voted with careful deliberation in a way that she felt benefited individual rights and the Constitution (which she viewed to be "an ever changing work in progress.") Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said, "O'Connor was a conservative, but she saw the complexity of church-state issues and tried to choose a course that respected the country's religious diversity" (Hudson 2005). O'Connor voted in favor of religious institutions,^{[clarification} ^needed] such as in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, Mitchell v. Helms, and Rosenberger v. University of Virginia. Conversly, in Lee v. Weisman she was part of the majority in the case that saw religious prayer and pressure to stand in silence at a graduation ceremony as part of a religious act that coerced people to support or to participate in religion, which is strictly prohibited by the Establishment Clause. This is consistent with a similar case, Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, involving prayer at a school football game. In this case O'Connor joined the majority opinion that stated prayer at school football games violates the Establishment Clause (Oyez, 2016). O'Connor was the first justice to articulate the "no endorsement" standard for the Establishment Clause.^[57] In Lynch v. Donnelly, O'Connor wrote for a 5–4 majority that a nativity scene in a public Christmas display did not violate the First Amendment because it was not expressing an endorsement or disapproval of any religion.^[57]

Fourth Amendment:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

According to George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, "O'Connor was an eloquent opponent of intrusive group searches that threatened privacy without increasing security. In a 1983 opinion upholding searches by drug-sniffing dogs, she recognized that a search is most likely to be considered constitutionally reasonable if it is very effective at discovering contraband without revealing innocent but embarrassinginformation."^[58] Washington College of Law law professor Andrew Taslitz, referencing O'Connor's dissent in a 2001 case, said of her Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: "O'Connor recognizes that needless humiliation of an individual is an important factor in determining Fourth Amendment reasonableness."^[59] O'Connor once quoted the social contract theory of John Locke as influencing her views on the reasonableness and constitutionality of government action.^[60]

Cases involving race

In the 1990 and 1995 Missouri v. Jenkins rulings, O'Connor voted with the majority that district courts had no authority to require the state of Missouri to increase school funding in order to counteract racial inequality. In the 1991 Freeman v. Pitts case, O'Connor joined a concurring opinion in a plurality, agreeing that a school district that had formerly been under judicial review for racial segregation could be freed of this review, even though not all desegregation targets had been met. Law professor Herman Schwartz criticized these rulings, writing that in both cases "both the fact and effects of segregation were still present."^[61]

In 1987's McCleskey v. Kemp, O'Connor joined a 5–4 majority that voted to uphold the death penalty for an African American man, Warren McCleskey, convicted of killing a white police officer, despite statistical evidence that black defendants were more likely to receive the death penalty than others both in Georgia and in the U.S. as a whole.^[61][62][63]

In 1996's Shaw v. Hunt and Shaw v. Reno, O'Connor joined a Rehnquist opinion, following an earlier precedent from an opinion she authored in 1993, in which the Court struck down an electoral districting plan designed to facilitate the election of two black representatives out of twelve from North Carolina, a state that had not had any black representative since Reconstruction, despite being approximately 20% black^[61]—the Court held that the districts were unacceptably gerrymandered and O'Connor called the odd shape of the district in question, North Carolina's 12th, "bizarre".

Law Professor Herman Schwartz called O'Connor "the Court's leader in its assault on racially oriented affirmative action,"^[61] although she joined with the Court in upholding the constitutionality of race-based admissions to universities.^[32]

In 2003, she authored a majority Supreme Court opinion (Grutter v. Bollinger) saying racial affirmative action shouldn't be constitutional permanently, but long enough to correct past discrimination—with an approximate limit of around 25 years.^[64]

Abortion

In her confirmation hearings and early days on the Court, O'Connor was carefully ambiguous on the issue of abortion, as some conservatives questioned her pro-life credentials on the basis of some of her votes in the Arizona legislature.^[37] O'Connor generally dissented from 1980s opinions which took an expansive view of Roe v. Wade; she criticized that decision's "trimester approach" sharply in her dissent in 1983's City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health. She criticized Roe in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: "... I dispute not only the wisdom but also the legitimacy of the Court's attempt to discredit and pre-empt state abortion regulation regardless of the interests it serves and the impact it has."^[65] In 1989, O'Connor stated during the deliberations over the Webster case that she would not overrule Roe.^[66] While on the Court, O'Connor did not vote to strike down any restrictions on abortion until Hodgson v. Minnesota in 1990.^[67]

O'Connor allowed certain limits to be placed on access to abortion, but supported the fundamental right to abortion protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, O'Connor used a test she had originally developed in City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health to limit the holding of Roe v. Wade, opening up a legislative portal where a State could enact measures so long as they did not place an "undue burden" on a woman's right to an abortion. Casey revised downward the standard of scrutiny federal courts would apply to state abortion restrictions, a major departure from Roe. However it preserved Roe's core constitutional precept: that the Fourteenth Amendment implies and protects a fundamental right to control the outcomes of one's reproductive actions. Writing the plurality opinion for the Court, O'Connor, along with Justices Kennedy and Souter, famously declared: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State."^[68]

Foreign law:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

O'Connor was a vigorous defender of the citing of foreign laws in judicial decisions.^[69] In a well-publicized^[citation ^needed] October 28, 2003, speech at the Southern Center for International Studies, O'Connor said:

The impressions we create in this world are important and can leave their mark ... [T]here is talk today about the "internationalization of legal relations". We are already seeing this in American courts, and should see it increasingly in the future. This does not mean, of course, that our courts can or should abandon their character as domestic institutions. But conclusions reached by other countries and by the international community, although not formally binding upon our decisions, should at times constitute persuasive authority in American courts—what is sometimes called "transjudicialism".^[70]

In the speech she noted the 2002 Court case Atkins v. Virginia, in which the majority decision (which included her) cited disapproval of the death penalty in Europe as part of its argument. This speech, and the general concept of relying on foreign law and opinion, was widely criticized by conservatives. In May 2004, a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives responded by passing a non-binding resolution, the "Reaffirmation of American Independence Resolution", stating that "U.S. judicial decisions should not be based on any foreign laws, court decisions, or pronouncements of foreign governments unless they are relevant to determining the meaning of American constitutional and statutory law."^[71]

O'Connor once quoted the constitution of the Middle Eastern nation of Bahrain, which states that "[n]o authority shall prevail over the judgement of a judge, and under no circumstances may the course of justice be interfered with." Further, "[i]t is in everyone's interest to foster the rule-of-law evolution." O'Connor proposed that such ideas be taught in American law schools, high schools and universities. Critics contend that such thinking is contrary to the U.S. Constitution and establishes a rule of man, rather than law.^[70] In her retirement, she has continued to speak and organize conferences on the issue of judicial independence.

Commentary and analysis:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

O'Connor's case-by-case approach routinely placed her in the center of the Court and drew both criticism and praise. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, for example, described her as lacking a judicial philosophy and instead displaying "political positioning embedded in a social agenda".^[72] Conservative commentator, Ramesh Ponnuru, wrote that, even though O'Connor "has voted reasonably well", her tendency to issue very case-specific rulings "undermines the predictability of the law and aggrandizes the judicial role".^[73]

Response to being first woman on the Supreme Court:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

O'Connor has said she felt a responsibility to demonstrate women could do the job of justice.^[24] She faced some practical concerns, including the lack of a woman's restroom near the Courtroom.^[24]

Two years after O'Connor joined the Court, The New York Times published an editorial which mentioned the "nine men"^[74] of the "SCOTUS", or Supreme Court of the United States.^[74] O'Connor responded with a letter to the editor reminding the Times that the Court was no longer composed of nine men and referred to herself as FWOTSC (First Woman On The Supreme Court).^[75]

In several speeches broadcast nationally on the cable network C-SPAN, she mentioned feeling some relief from the media clamor when Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined her as an Associate Justice of the Court in 1993.^[citation ^needed] In May 2010, O'Connor warned female Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan about the "unpleasant" process of confirmation hearings.^[76]

Other activities while serving on the Court:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In 2003, she wrote a book titled The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice (ISBN 0-375-50925-9).^[citation ^needed] In 2005, she wrote a children's book, Chico, named for her favorite horse, which gives an autobiographical description of her childhood.^[77]

Retirement:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

On December 12, 2000, The Wall Street Journal reported that O'Connor was reluctant to retire with a Democrat in the presidency: "At an Election Night party at the Washington, D.C. home of Mary Ann Stoessel, widow of former Ambassador Walter Stoessel, the justice's husband, John O'Connor, mentioned to others her desire to step down, according to three witnesses. But Mr. O'Connor said his wife would be reluctant to retire if a Democrat were in the White House and would choose her replacement. Justice O'Connor declined to comment."^[78]

...

nyt

onservative groups today intensified their attack on Judge Sandra Day O'Connor, President Reagan's nominee for the Supreme Court, but Senate Republicans predicted victory and Senator Barry Goldwater warned that her critics should ''back off.''

The Senate Republican leader, Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, said at a news conference that Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, had assured him that he was ''ready to move'' as soon as the White House formally submitted the nomination.

Mr. Baker predicted that Judge O'Connor would be ''confirmed easily either before the recess, more likely shortly after we return'' on Sept. 9.

Judge O'Connor, 51 years old, a former Republican leader in the Arizona Legislature, serves on the Arizona Court of Appeals. If confirmed, she will replace Associate Justice Potter Stewart when the Court reconvenes on the first Monday of October. Denounced Two Votes

Anti-abortion forces have denounced two votes that she cast in 1970 and 1974, while a member of the Arizona Senate, and to some extent her past support for the proposed equal rights amendment to the Federal Constitution.

Continue reading the main story

Senator Goldwater, one of Judge O'Connor's leading supporters, declared in a Senate speech that ''a lot of foolish claptrap'' had been circulated about her position.

''Instead of jumping to conclusions about her views, on the basis of years' old positions that were taken in a different context and setting, why can't these people wait until the nomination hearings?'' Mr. Goldwater asked. ''The right-to-life groups are totally off base and should back off.''

But a coalition of 21 conservative and anti-abortion groups charged that Mr. Reagan did not fully understand Judge O'Connor's voting record. The charge involved a Justice Department memorandum given to Mr. Reagan that said Judge O'Connor did not remember how she voted on the 1970 measure, which concerned Arizona's criminal prohibitions against abortion. 'Without All the Cards'

''I think when he has all the facts - if they are true - he may change his mind,'' said Paul Weyrich, head of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. ''I think the decision was made without all the cards in the deck,''

The White House said Judge O'Connor would come to Washington next week to meet with members of the Judiciary Committee. But a survey of the panel revealed no outright opposition, with about half the members leaning in favor of the nomination and others withholding judgment pending confirmation hearings.

Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, a leading conservative who is a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he would not comment before talking to Judge O'Connor.

Another committee member, Alan K. Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, said, ''I don't think there are enough horses to deny this nomination in any way.''

cnn

She always insisted it was luck that led to her appointment as the first woman on the US Supreme Court. But Sandra Day O'Connor was ready for her luck. She demonstrated that 35 years ago this summer when Reagan administration lawyers flew to Arizona to interview her as one of several candidates for a court vacancy.

O'Connor appeared an unlikely contender. She was a judge on a mid-level state court and little known beyond Arizona. But earlier, as the first woman state senate majority leader in the country, she had proven herself a shrewd operator in the backrooms of legislative politics. And a serendipitous connection had landed her on the administration's short list.

With the first-ever nomination by a major party of a woman for president, judicial pioneer O'Connor's name has been in the air. Now retired for a decade, she lives quietly at age 86 back in her home state, no longer making public appearances or engaged in the civics education and other projects she took on after she left the bench. Yet her legacy endures. In the recently completed Supreme Court term, significant rulings on abortion rights and university affirmative action relied on precedents crafted by O'Connor.

Justice Kennedy's evolution on race

The high court, still missing a successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, has entered a new era of uncertainty. But with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton dominating in the polls, there is a chance a first woman president's court appointments would protect those liberal-leaning precedents and extend the legacy of the first woman justice even longer.

Neither Ronald Reagan's choice nor O'Connor's influence might have been predicted at the outset. Her path 35 years ago demonstrates how a long-odds nominee gets skillfully positioned to enjoy the luck of presidential selection.

When Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart sent word that he would be retiring in 1981, Attorney General William French Smith turned to a list of names he had been collecting, including one on a pink telephone message slip he kept on his desk. Many of the possible nominees were women because Reagan, a Republican, had vowed in the heat of his 1980 challenge to Democratic President Jimmy Carter that he would appoint the first woman justice if elected. For two centuries, only men had sat on America's highest court.

According to Smith's notes that I found in the Reagan presidential archive when writing a 2005 biography of O'Connor, Smith had scrawled only her last name on the telephone slip. His aides were initially uncertain just who O'Connor was.< ... Catholic nuns from the Little Sisters of the Poor walk down the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in March. The group was challenging the government's new health-care regulations. Lawyers for the nuns and other religious nonprofits told the court that the so-called contraceptive mandate forces these groups to either violate their religious beliefs or pay ruinous fines. The justices, in a unanimous decision in May, sent the case back down to the lower courts for opposing parties to work out a compromise.

...

Affirmative action: Abigail Fisher, a Texas woman who challenged the use of race in college admissions, speaks to reporters outside the Supreme Court in December. That month, Supreme Court justicesappeared divided about a program at the University of Texas that takes race into consideration as one factor of admissions. In June, the court upheld the program in a 4-3 ruling. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the case, presumably because she dealt with it in her previous job as solicitor general.

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Public-sector unions: Rebecca Friedrichs, lead plaintiff in the case Friedrichs v. the California Teachers Association, walks with lead counsel Michael Carvin after the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments on the case in January. The ruling in March was split 4-4, so the lower-court decision was affirmed in a victory for public-sector unions. At issue was whether non-members of a public-sector union could still be compelled to pay fees for collective bargaining that goes to issues such as wages and grievances. " data-src-mini="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111206-01-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" data-src-xsmall="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111206-01-scotus-2015-16-session-medium-plus-169.jpg" data-src-small="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111206-01-scotus-2015-16-session-large-169.jpg" data-src-medium="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111206-01-scotus-2015-16-session-exlarge-169.jpg" data-src-large="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111206-01-scotus-2015-16-session-super-169.jpg" data-src-full16x9="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111206-01-scotus-2015-16-session-full-169.jpg" data-src-mini1x1="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111206-01-scotus-2015-16-session-small-11.jpg" data-eq-pts="mini: 0, xsmall: 221, small: 308, medium: 461, large: 781" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAJAJEAAAAAAP///////wAAACH5BAEAAAIALAAAAAAQAAkAAAIKlI+py+0Po5yUFQA7" data-cut-format="16:9" data-eq-state="mini xsmall small medium" data-src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111206-01-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; display: block; height: 438.75px; width: 780px; position: absolute; margin-bottom: 0px; opacity: 1; transform: translateZ(0px); transition: opacity 0.4s ease 0s; transform-style: preserve-3d;" />

PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

Public-sector unions: Rebecca Friedrichs, lead plaintiff in the case Friedrichs v. the California Teachers Association, walks with lead counsel Michael Carvin after the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments on the case in January. The ruling in March was split 4-4, so the lower-court decision was affirmed in a victory for public-sector unions. At issue was whether non-members of a public-sector union could still be compelled to pay fees for collective bargaining that goes to issues such as wages and grievances.

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Scalia's replacement:Obama joins his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, in the Rose Garden of the White House in March. But Republicans have vowed to block any replacement for Antonin Scalia until a new President takes office. " data-src-mini="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111910-05-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" data-src-xsmall="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111910-05-scotus-2015-16-session-medium-plus-169.jpg" data-src-small="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111910-05-scotus-2015-16-session-large-169.jpg" data-src-medium="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111910-05-scotus-2015-16-session-exlarge-169.jpg" data-src-large="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111910-05-scotus-2015-16-session-super-169.jpg" data-src-full16x9="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111910-05-scotus-2015-16-session-full-169.jpg" data-src-mini1x1="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111910-05-scotus-2015-16-session-small-11.jpg" data-eq-pts="mini: 0, xsmall: 221, small: 308, medium: 461, large: 781" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAJAJEAAAAAAP///////wAAACH5BAEAAAIALAAAAAAQAAkAAAIKlI+py+0Po5yUFQA7" data-cut-format="16:9" data-eq-state="mini xsmall small medium" data-src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111910-05-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; display: block; height: 438.75px; width: 780px; position: absolute; margin-bottom: 0px; opacity: 1; transform: translateZ(0px); transition: opacity 0.4s ease 0s; transform-style: preserve-3d;" />

PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

Scalia's replacement: Obama joins his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, in the Rose Garden of the White House in March. But Republicans have vowed to block any replacement for Antonin Scalia until a new President takes office.

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is operating with eight justices this year following the death of Antonin Scalia in February. See some of the prominent issues that the high court has faced -- or is still facing -- in 2016." data-src-mini="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" data-src-xsmall="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-medium-plus-169.jpg" data-src-small="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-large-169.jpg" data-src-medium="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-exlarge-169.jpg" data-src-large="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-super-169.jpg" data-src-full16x9="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-full-169.jpg" data-src-mini1x1="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-small-11.jpg" data-eq-pts="mini: 0, xsmall: 221, small: 308, medium: 461, large: 781" src="https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-exlarge-169.jpg" data-cut-format="16:9" data-eq-state="mini xsmall small medium" data-src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111714-03-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" data-demand-load="loaded" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; display: block; height: 438.75px; width: 780px; position: absolute; margin-bottom: 0px; opacity: 1; transform: translateZ(0px); transition: opacity 0.4s ease 0s; transform-style: preserve-3d;" />

PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

The Supreme Court is operating with eight justices this year following the death of Antonin Scalia in February. See some of the prominent issues that the high court has faced -- or is still facing -- in 2016.

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Texas abortion law: Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Woman's Health, gestures to the crowd as she and Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, walk down the steps of the Supreme Court in March. They challenged parts of a Texas law -- struck down by the Supreme Court in June -- that required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The law also mandated that clinics upgrade their facilities to hospital-like standards. Supporters of the law argued that it was meant to protect women's health, but opponents said it was instead a disguised attempt to end abortion and that women would find it harder to end a pregnancy legally." data-src-mini="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111827-04-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" data-src-xsmall="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111827-04-scotus-2015-16-session-medium-plus-169.jpg" data-src-small="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111827-04-scotus-2015-16-session-large-169.jpg" data-src-medium="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111827-04-scotus-2015-16-session-exlarge-169.jpg" data-src-large="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111827-04-scotus-2015-16-session-super-169.jpg" data-src-full16x9="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111827-04-scotus-2015-16-session-full-169.jpg" data-src-mini1x1="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111827-04-scotus-2015-16-session-small-11.jpg" data-eq-pts="mini: 0, xsmall: 221, small: 308, medium: 461, large: 781" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAJAJEAAAAAAP///////wAAACH5BAEAAAIALAAAAAAQAAkAAAIKlI+py+0Po5yUFQA7" data-cut-format="16:9" data-eq-state="mini xsmall small medium" data-src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111827-04-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; display: block; height: 438.75px; width: 780px; position: absolute; margin-bottom: 0px; opacity: 1; transform: translateZ(0px); transition: opacity 0.4s ease 0s; transform-style: preserve-3d;" />

PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

Texas abortion law: Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Woman's Health, gestures to the crowd as she and Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, walk down the steps of the Supreme Court in March. They challenged parts of a Texas law -- struck down by the Supreme Court in June -- that required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. The law also mandated that clinics upgrade their facilities to hospital-like standards. Supporters of the law argued that it was meant to protect women's health, but opponents said it was instead a disguised attempt to end abortion and that women would find it harder to end a pregnancy legally.

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Obama's immigration actions: Demonstrators gather for a pro-immigration rally outside the Supreme Court in January. In June, the court was deadlockedon executive actions President Barack Obama imposed two years ago on immigration. The actions, blocked from going forward in February 2015, were meant to enable millions of eligible undocumented immigrants to receive temporary relief from the threat of deportation. The immigrants would also be allowed to apply for programs that could qualify them for work authorization and associated benefits. June's ruling means that the programs will remain blocked and the issue will return to the lower court." data-src-mini="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111625-02-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" data-src-xsmall="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111625-02-scotus-2015-16-session-medium-plus-169.jpg" data-src-small="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111625-02-scotus-2015-16-session-large-169.jpg" data-src-medium="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111625-02-scotus-2015-16-session-exlarge-169.jpg" data-src-large="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111625-02-scotus-2015-16-session-super-169.jpg" data-src-full16x9="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111625-02-scotus-2015-16-session-full-169.jpg" data-src-mini1x1="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111625-02-scotus-2015-16-session-small-11.jpg" data-eq-pts="mini: 0, xsmall: 221, small: 308, medium: 461, large: 781" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAJAJEAAAAAAP///////wAAACH5BAEAAAIALAAAAAAQAAkAAAIKlI+py+0Po5yUFQA7" data-cut-format="16:9" data-eq-state="mini xsmall small medium" data-src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111625-02-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; display: block; height: 438.75px; width: 780px; position: absolute; margin-bottom: 0px; opacity: 1; transform: translateZ(0px); transition: opacity 0.4s ease 0s; transform-style: preserve-3d;" />

PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

Obama's immigration actions: Demonstrators gather for a pro-immigration rally outside the Supreme Court in January. In June, the court was deadlockedon executive actions President Barack Obama imposed two years ago on immigration. The actions, blocked from going forward in February 2015, were meant to enable millions of eligible undocumented immigrants to receive temporary relief from the threat of deportation. The immigrants would also be allowed to apply for programs that could qualify them for work authorization and associated benefits. June's ruling means that the programs will remain blocked and the issue will return to the lower court.

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Obamacare contraception mandate:Catholic nuns from the Little Sisters of the Poor walk down the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in March. The group was challenging the government's new health-care regulations. Lawyers for the nuns and other religious nonprofits told the court that the so-called contraceptive mandate forces these groups to either violate their religious beliefs or pay ruinous fines. The justices, in a unanimous decision in May, sent the case back down to the lower courts for opposing parties to work out a compromise." data-src-mini="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111953-06-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" data-src-xsmall="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111953-06-scotus-2015-16-session-medium-plus-169.jpg" data-src-small="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111953-06-scotus-2015-16-session-large-169.jpg" data-src-medium="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111953-06-scotus-2015-16-session-exlarge-169.jpg" data-src-large="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111953-06-scotus-2015-16-session-super-169.jpg" data-src-full16x9="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111953-06-scotus-2015-16-session-full-169.jpg" data-src-mini1x1="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111953-06-scotus-2015-16-session-small-11.jpg" data-eq-pts="mini: 0, xsmall: 221, small: 308, medium: 461, large: 781" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAJAJEAAAAAAP///////wAAACH5BAEAAAIALAAAAAAQAAkAAAIKlI+py+0Po5yUFQA7" data-cut-format="16:9" data-eq-state="mini xsmall small medium" data-src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160531111953-06-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; display: block; height: 438.75px; width: 780px; position: absolute; margin-bottom: 0px; opacity: 1; transform: translateZ(0px); transition: opacity 0.4s ease 0s; transform-style: preserve-3d;" />

PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

Obamacare contraception mandate: Catholic nuns from the Little Sisters of the Poor walk down the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in March. The group was challenging the government's new health-care regulations. Lawyers for the nuns and other religious nonprofits told the court that the so-called contraceptive mandate forces these groups to either violate their religious beliefs or pay ruinous fines. The justices, in a unanimous decision in May, sent the case back down to the lower courts for opposing parties to work out a compromise.

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Affirmative action: Abigail Fisher, a Texas woman who challenged the use of race in college admissions, speaks to reporters outside the Supreme Court in December. That month, Supreme Court justices appeared divided about a program at the University of Texas that takes race into consideration as one factor of admissions. In June, the court upheld the program in a 4-3 ruling. Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the case, presumably because she dealt with it in her previous job as solicitor general." data-src-mini="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160601171534-10-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" data-src-xsmall="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160601171534-10-scotus-2015-16-session-medium-plus-169.jpg" data-src-small="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160601171534-10-scotus-2015-16-session-large-169.jpg" data-src-medium="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160601171534-10-scotus-2015-16-session-exlarge-169.jpg" data-src-large="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160601171534-10-scotus-2015-16-session-super-169.jpg" data-src-full16x9="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160601171534-10-scotus-2015-16-session-full-169.jpg" data-src-mini1x1="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160601171534-10-scotus-2015-16-session-small-11.jpg" data-eq-pts="mini: 0, xsmall: 221, small: 308, medium: 461, large: 781" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAJAJEAAAAAAP///////wAAACH5BAEAAAIALAAAAAAQAAkAAAIKlI+py+0Po5yUFQA7" data-cut-format="16:9" data-eq-state="mini xsmall small medium" data-src="//cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/160601171534-10-scotus-2015-16-session-small-169.jpg" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; display: block; height: 438.75px; width: 780px; position: absolute; margin-bottom: 0px; opacity: 1; transform: translateZ(0px); transition: opacity 0.4s ease 0s; transform-style: preserve-3d;" />

PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

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PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

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PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

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PHOTOS: Supreme Court issues in 2016

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The original source of the Smith note is not fully known (Smith lost track of it after the nomination and has since died), but Fred Fielding, White House counsel, told me then-Chief Justice Warren Burger had been touting her to top administration officials. Burger had met O'Connor in 1979 on a house boat vacation on Lake Powell in Utah with mutual friends. He was impressed and began involving her in extracurricular judicial projects on the national scene.

O'Connor had graduated from Stanford law school in 1952, near the top of her class, but been rejected for positions at large law firms. Women were simply not considered up to the task: one firm offered her a job as a legal secretary. She turned to public service, navigating a county attorney's office, the state legislature, then Arizona courts. Some posts came through political appointment; others required her to mount campaigns and win election.

Along the way, she became a Republican Party loyalist, befriending US Sen. Barry Goldwater and co-chairing President Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign in Arizona.

Reared on a desolate ranch with a demanding father, O'Connor was imbued with a rigorous work ethic and resilience. Smith later wrote that O'Connor, "both in her looks and in her personality, had that same direct friendliness one associates with the wide-open territory where she lived." She also was a natural politician who could size up a room and valued the human touch.

After Smith's team delved into her legislative and judicial record, the attorney general dispatched assistants Ken Starr and Jonathan Rose to Phoenix to interview her. Starr told me years later that he was surprised O'Connor, sitting on an intermediate state court, had drawn Smith's interest.

Chief Justice John Roberts' game of chess

"There was a certain oddity to her being in the mix at all," he said. "Judge O'Connor was in Arizona, not on an impressive court, not in a key state. I was skeptical."

But, he said, "she had clearly prepared for us."

O'Connor had boned up on constitutional issues and was ready for their questions about her judicial philosophy. On a lunch break, O'Connor, who always understood the persuasive nature of a good meal, brought out a salmon mousse salad.

After hearing details of their daylong session, attorney general Smith arranged for O'Connor to fly to Washington to meet with him and key White House officials. Before the week was over, the 51-year-old O'Connor was in the Oval Office with Reagan. The former California governor responded immediately to a woman who could converse about horses and constitutional rulings.

On her courtesy calls with senators, she addressed their questions of legal substance and dropped in mentions to their individual backgrounds and legislative interests. She worked around the clock for her confirmation hearings. Leaving nothing to luck, she pored over piles of briefing books prepared by Department of Justice lawyers. One of those young attorneys helping prep her for questioning had just started on the job: John Roberts, who would eventually be appointed chief justice of the United States.

O'Connor was approved by a Senate vote of 99-0 on September 21 and took the oath of office four days later.

Once on the court, she did not wait for her luck. As happened at the Arizona Capitol, she learned to count votes and broker consensus. Her moderate non-doctrinaire approach bridged her colleagues' dueling ideologies. Over nearly 25 years on the bench, her legal reasoning set standards for abortion rights, religious disputes and death penalty appeals.

After she retired in January 2006, succeeded by the more conservative Samuel Alito, the court shifted to the right. Her opinions, including to uphold abortion rights and racial remedies, were scaled back. During a legal conference in 2009, O'Connor complained that some of her decisions were "being dismantled."

When I asked how she felt about it, O'Connor, then 79, said, "What would you feel? I'd be a little bit disappointed. If you think you've been helpful, and then it's dismantled, you think, 'Oh dear.' But life goes on."

Her frustration may be short-lived.

The court since the February death of the conservative Scalia is shifting again. The majority's June decision endorsing a University of Texas affirmative action plan bolstered an opinion written by O'Connor in a 2003 dispute from the University of Michigan. Similarly, the court's invalidation of a tough Texas abortion regulation relied on and reinforced a milestone decision O'Connor wrote in 1992 with Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter.

Especially striking was how much Kennedy, who authored the opinion upholding the Texas race-conscious admissions policy, drew from O'Connor's 2003 decision in the Michigan case. He had dissented back then, yet in June highlighted her emphasis on the way campus diversity prepares students for today's increasingly diverse society.

For her part, O'Connor used to brush off questions about her influence.

"We try to persuade by the strength of the argument," she told me. "Everyone has a very key vote."

Hers has lasted.

MAY 7, 2013

JUSTICE O’CONNOR REGRETS

POSTED BY JEFFREY TOOBIN

Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court seven years ago, made some news the other day. In an interview with the editorial board of the Chicago *Tribune*, she expressed misgivings about one of the signature decisions of her judicial career: Bush v. Gore. “Maybe the Court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’ ” The case, she said, which effectively awarded the 2000 Presidential election to George W. Bush, “stirred up the public” and “gave the Court a less than perfect reputation.”

It was not a full-fledged denunciation of the Court’s opinion, but it was a decided shift in O’Connor’s views. Ever since the decision in 2000, in which a five-Justice majority ended a recount of votes that had been ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, O’Connor has defended the result publicly. (She did so on “The Daily Show.”) I have heard O’Connor defend Bush v. Gore any number of times, at events ranging from law-school convocations to small dinner parties.

So what changed? The Republican Party—O’Connor’s Republican Party.

The Court, in its history, has had many Justices who formerly held elective office—Earl Warren, a former Governor of California; William Howard Taft, who’d been President; Hugo Black, a onetime Senator—but O’Connor was last to have done so. (She was a state senator in Arizona.) That experience has always been crucial to understanding her judicial philosophy. Temperamentally as well as politically, she was a Republican, to be sure, but she was a moderate conservative; even more than Ronald Reagan, the President who appointed her, George H. W. Bush was O’Connor’s ideal President. In the ballot box as well as on the Supreme Court, O’Connor voted for George W. Bush thinking that he would be a President much like his father. (The story of O’Connor’s election-night rooting for Bush in 2000 is well-known; I’ve told it in two books.)

As for the Presidency of the younger Bush, O’Connor was disappointed, to put it mildly. The story of the last decade or so of her life is the story of her increasing alienation from the modern Republican Party. The key moment for her was the Terri Schiavo case, in 2005, when the President and congressional Republicans mobilized overnight to intervene in the case of a Florida woman who was in a persistent vegetative state, and attempted to overrule her husband’s request to remove her feeding tubes. O’Connor, who was at that moment dealing with the descent of her own husband into Alzheimer’s disease, was appalled at the fanaticism on display. But largely because of her husband’s condition, O’Connor nevertheless announced her departure from the Court later that year—and gave George W. Bush the chance to put his stamp, and that of the modern Republican Party, on her beloved Court.

In the past seven years, O’Connor has been increasingly clear about her disenchantment with the work of her successors, especially Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., (who took her seat). She has been harshly critical of the Court’s decision in Citizens United, which revolutionized the law of campaign finance. Indeed, her major outside activity since retiring has been to try to persuade states to have a system of appointed, as opposed to elected, judges. A primary reason why O’Connor opposes judicial election is because of the influence of campaign contributions—which is, of course, precisely the kind of spending allowed by Citizens United.

It may be that O’Connor chose this moment to speak out because she knows (or suspects) that the Court is about to demolish one of her most important achievements. In 2003, O’Connor wrote the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed the use of affirmative action in admissions in higher education. The decision was a classic O’Connor compromise: she supported diversity but not quotas; she embraced racial preferences but put a time limit on their use—twenty-five years. But now, just a decade later, the Court appears poised to undo, or at least limit, O’Connor’s decision. In the next month or so, the Justices will decide Fisher v. University of Texas, which is a direct challenge to Grutter. The prospect of a thwarted legacy focusses any retired Justice’s mind.

And O’Connor was not alone as a Republican Justice looking on with horror at what her party has become. The two Justices who left the Court after O’Connor were also Republicans who departed aghast at the modern Republican Party. David Souter and John Paul Stevens were so repulsed by the party of George W. Bush that they gave the most precious gift any Justice can proffer to his successor, Barack Obama—their seats on the Court. There is no more eloquent testimony to the evolution of the Republican Party than the ideological fate of the last three Justices to leave the Supreme Court: O’Connor, Souter, and Stevens. In this way, O’Connor’s apostasy on Bush v. Gore is a surprise—but perhaps only because it took so long.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/sandra-day-oconnor-shift-on-bush-v-gore.html

RBG: Jeff, I don’t think I changed. Perhaps I am a little less tentative than I was when I was a new justice. But what really changed was the composition of the Court. Think of 2006, when Justice O’Connor left us, and the cases since then in which the Court divided five to four and I was one of the four, but would have been among the five if Justice O’Connor had remained. So I don’t think that my jurisprudence has changed, but the issues coming before the Court are getting a different reception.

JR: What decisions would have come out differently if Justice O’Connor were still on the Court?

RBG: She would have been with us in Citizens United, in Shelby County, probably in Hobby Lobby, too.

http://www.alternet.org/justice-sandra-day-oconnor-maybe-bush-v-gore-wasnt-best-decision

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said in an interview aired Sunday that the American public's diminishing approval of the nation’s highest court is a "a great disappointment to me."

"In the past, when the public is asked about three branches of government, the judicial branch has had the highest respect," O’Connor told Bob Schieffer on CBS's "Face the Nation." "Now it’s the same for all, it’s all down. It’s a great disappointment to me."

Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center found that Americans view the current Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts more negatively than at any point in the past 25 years, with a mere 52 percent of citizens viewing it favorably. According to a more recent poll from The New York Times and CBS News, only 44 percent of Americans approve of the current Supreme Court.

O'Connor, who announced her retirement from the court in 2005, ventured a guess as to what precipitated the court’s falling favorability ratings: the Bush v. Gore decision of 2000, in which she joined the 5-4 majority in quashing the Florida recount and ending Al Gore’s presidential hopes.

“There’s been some suggestion that the trend down began with the Bush v. Gore decision,” O’Connor said. “That could be something that triggered public reexamination.”

Yet O’Connor told Schieffer that she doesn’t regret the vote she cast in that case, one of the court's most controversial. “No. It was a tough deal in a closely watched election,” O’Connor said. “It’s no fun to be part of a group of decision makers who have to decide which side the ball is going to fall on.”

O’Connor declined to say how she would have voted in the Supreme Court’s controversial health care decision, in which Roberts joined the court’s liberal wing in upholding the Affordable Care Act's insurance mandate as a tax. She did, however, reiterate her disagreement with the court’s controversial Citizens United decision that helped give rise to super PAC’s and unprecedented corporate spending in elections.

Asked if the growth of super PACs has damaged American politics, O’Connor said, “It hasn’t helped. I’ll put it that way.”

O’Connor had previously suggested the ruling was a mistake, telling law students in 2006 that “no state can possibly benefit from having that much money injected into a political campaign.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/05/sandra-day-oconnor-supreme-court_n_1744056.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular